Lord Grantham’s Double Standard

In the discussion of last night’s Downton Abbey, I was struck by some reader comments about the way the show handled Thomas’s homosexuality. For non-viewers, one of the household staff, the villainous closeted homosexual Thomas, mistakenly believed a young staff was sexually interested in him, and made a pass at him. Thomas stood to be personally and professionally ruined, and perhaps even carted off to jail, but nearly everyone took mercy on him, and he came through it unharmed.

Some of you found it anachronistic that everyone except the rigid butler Carson would be so tolerant back in 1920. I think that’s right. Whether or not Thomas deserved mercy is not the point; the point is that it’s hard to imagine that in Britain of that era, he would have so readily received it from nearly everyone.

Another of you made the excellent point that Lord Grantham was highly tolerant of Thomas’s failure, even though he was extremely harsh and judgmental of Ethel, the housemaid who fell from grace by having a child outside of wedlock, and then worked for a while as a prostitute. As we have seen, harsh Lord Grantham was unwilling to grant Ethel the opportunity to redeem herself from her sexual sin and disgrace. But for Thomas, a different standard.

Perhaps this is a matter of misogyny. In fact, it almost certainly is. But perhaps too it is a matter of a man in power — the earl — being far more tolerant of sins he recognizes. As Grantham said to his valet last night, this sort of thing happened to him at Eton all the time.

I found myself wondering this morning about whether this explains the bishops’ response to the misbehavior (and worse) of sexually active gays in the priesthood. Even if the bishops themselves — a male ecclesial aristocracy — weren’t guilty of misbehavior, perhaps it was an evil to which they are particularly insensitive because they have seen a lot of it. To understand all is to forgive all, etc.

Rod, have you ever read “Surprised By Joy” by C.S. Lewis? He recounts his experiences at boarding school, and I have to say that the British definitely had a uniquely dispassionate take on the issue, one that viewed the proclivities of certain men as a fairly unremarkable (if gravely unfortunate) fact of life.

Also, don’t forget that Lord Grantham shows extreme levels of loyalty towards people who have been loyal to him, and he seems rather oblivious at times to the ways in which Thomas has not been loyal. But Thomas has been there for a long time, in any event. Ethel, on the other hand, was a relative newcomer when she had to leave in disgrace.

“it’s hard to imagine that in Britain of that era, he would have so readily received it from nearly everyone.”

I don’t find it hard to imagine at all. I don’t watch the show, but I was going to comment on the prep school thing. I am glad to hear that they mentioned it.

I think that these sorts of things were tolerated quite often. Even today, in my little rural town, homosexuality is hardly something that’s “celebrated.” But there’s a pretty sizable minority of folks who are gay and they are very much a part of the community. Just nobody is supposed to talk about it.

A more tolerant attitude in England (not the US) in 1920 would not surprise me – especially with imprisonment a likely outcome – because of the fate of Oscar Wilde a generation earlier. There would have been a sense of not wanting to recapitulate an unpleasant episode, that enough was enough.

“For non-viewers, one of the household staff, the villainous closeted homosexual Thomas, mistakenly believed a young staff was sexually interested in him, and made a pass at him.”

Sexual harassment is now “making a pass”? That’s what liberals want in the boy scouts, and everywhere else, in any case.

“Perhaps this is a matter of misogyny. In fact, it almost certainly is. ”

Not misogyny, I would say, but patriarchy.

“As Grantham said to his valet last night, this sort of thing happened to him at Eton all the time.”

And an earl like him wasn’t just as familiar with prostitution, even in practice, especially while young?

BTW, I don’t find Grantham harsh at all, quite the contrary; he can be stiff, and inflexible, but he’s one of the characters that makes DA such a soap-opera to me and so little realistic. He’s not caustic, vicious, virulent, abusive, insensitive, etc. Mostly nice, with a few exceptions, and that are usually stiffness.

Considering how way off the mark the whole treatment of the issue was, I’m not quite sure why we’re buying any aspect of it.

Yes, boys fooling around is a bit of a tradition in British boarding schools, but the idea that it was accepted or something to be “expected” or “understood” is absurd. Boys were tossed out of schools if caught or subjected to vicious bullying. Beatings were frequent, suicides occasional.

There was a level of tolerance for the inclination or the appearance of it, but acting out on it was a serious offense. Boys could have crushes on other boys, but sex? No. No lord would ever joke about being the object of other boys’ advances.

Even a “progressive” view in the 20s would have focused on “treating the condition” (in horrific ways, of course).

I haven’t seen the show, but wouldn’t Thomas making a pass against another servant be less unforgivable than just the fact that he is a homosexual. Was the other servant a minor? If he was than that really would be serious. But even if the young servant wasn’t a minor, an older man making sexual advances against a man barely out of adolescence calls to mind the man-boy love that was common among the ancient Greeks and Romans, much of which was not consensual.

I know nothing of the show–but I can say that this “tolerance” might not be too far off the mark. I say this having just read the biography of Alan Turing–who was a homosexual at that time (if a bit later–he was born in 1912..)–and while he couldn’t just come out and say that he was publicly–it did seem that he would often do exactly this kind of thing with various people–and he didn’t really suffer any kinds of consequences until the 1950’s–when he got arrested for it and underwent chemical castration (estrogen injections) for a year.

Thus–the existence of homosexuality–even if it wasn’t allowed to be public–was not an automatic jail sentence for people. (Considering what was implied by the biography about what young middle class and upper class boys endured at the elite “public schools” (actually–they were elite boarding schools)–it wouldn’t have surprised me if almost all upper class English boys and been sexually harrassed/abused at one point or another.. (All boys at these schools–when they just got there–were assigned to be virtual slaves to upper level boys–who called them “faggots” and got to cane/switch them on the buttocks for any supposed infractions… )

Memoirs, diaries and letters of early 20th century Britain do suggest that there was an attitude of *unspoken* tolerance towards homosexual behavior, provided those who engaged in it did not embarrass others by being brazen about it.

What was improbable about last night’s episode was the freedom with which the various characters spoke about it. At that time it was discussed in agonized euphemisms rather than outright expressions of revulsion. Worse, it was unlikely to the point of absurdity that someone like Alfred, or his supporters, would defend a tendency by saying he was born that way. In those days, people generally believed that all unfortunate tendencies, from madness to criminality, were the result of “bad blood,” so this was no defense. It would also have been rare, I think, for a woman of those days even to have heard of sodomy, or to know what it was. Vita Sackville-West, herself to become a famous lesbian, wrote in a letter to her husband that before she married, she hadn’t known such a thing existed. If she had not married a homosexual man, she might never have known.

What might have made *men* like Grantham or Bates tolerant was that casual, occasional sodomy was not terribly rare among either the lordly classes or working class men. The sexes were still very segregated, especially before the war. The young men who attended public schools had no accessible sexual outlets aside from each other; while for the servant class in England, marriage was often impossible, as many didn’t earn enough money to establish independent households and their terms of employment often forbade marriage.

This blog commented on the tacit tolerance of J Edgar Hoover and his ‘friend’, even by people like Richard Nixon, way back in the 1950s. Rock Hudson’s homosexuality was apparently and open secret. I suspect that even earlier, Anglo-American attitudes were ‘live and let live’ towards homosexual adults. Homosexual behavior was certainly stigmatized, but tolerated. Police action against homosexuals were generally designed to cut down on ‘cruising spots’, public sex, and other very overt behaviors among the ‘gay’ community.

Perhaps that’s why, even today, homosexual pride parades have a few ‘outrageous’ entries and why things like the Folsom Street Fair continue– the deep roots in the movement’s ‘heroic resistance’ phase dealt not with resistance to discrete homosexual couples, but rather to the resistance to the cops, and society at large, putting any restraints on gay behavior. There is a academic collection of essays called ‘Public Sex, Gay Space’, which from my brief perusal of the works via Google books, seems to be making exactly that point. Even ‘before Stonewall’, the New York Mattachine Society was using the legal system to get Suffolk County to stop raids on the ‘Meat Rack’ at Fire Island.

Long story short, the ‘oppression’ of homosexuals has been much exaggerated.

I would guess that homosexual behavior was considered, for lack of a better word, a developmental stage for boys and girls at school. Girls like Eleanor Roosevelt had crushes on older classmates or pretty teachers at their boarding schools, perhaps wrote them notes or gave them gifts of candy or flowers, maybe in some cases indulged in some physical affection. The prevailing view was that it was good practice for their real work of being romantic partners to their husbands when they were a bit older. I imagine it was looked at similarly for boys — fine for kids at school but when they reached their mid-twenties it was time to put away childish things. Of course some men and women didn’t outgrow it and that was considered more problematic. Someone like Grantham would indeed have seen a lot of homosexual behavior at boarding school. Cora and her daughters probably would have as well. The upper classes likely had more in common with the lower classes when it came to morality. The middle classes were probably considerably more like Carson.

It’s not so unreasonable – Just having anti-gay laws on the books did not mean there was much enthusiasm among people for actually prosectuing gays.

As others have noted, the common traditional attidue towards gays in much of the west was disapproval with a sense that not much could be done about it. For example this can be seen in the general blase attitude towards gay activity among sailors – ie the common 19th century rhyme “Ashore it’s wine, women and song; aboard it’s rum, bum and concertina.”

The idea one should aggressively use the power of the state to control homosexual activity is very much a progressive initiative – it was probably safer to proposition a man in 1850 than it was in 1950.

Historians have dug through the proescution records in early modern Europe under sodomy laws – despite the harshness of the laws as written there were very few convictions, and most of those were for sexual assault against same sex minors. Interesting, reformed Holland was an outlier in its aggressiveness harassment of gays.

Judith – it’s not inconceivable at all, especially among those of Lord Grantham’s class. As alluded to in the episode, private boys’ schools in the UK at that time were very well known for instances of homosexuality. Actually “instances” would probably be a gross understatement if you read many memoirs from the period. It was probably the worst kept secret in the UK, and the butt of many a music hall joke.

Hello Katel, yes that’s without a doubt true. But for Grantham to address the situation by asserting that gays are made that way? That’s what struck an off chord. But who knows. My father, who is pretty straight laced, makes some quite off color jokes about all the gays in the Navy during WWII which sound just like “…the butt of many a music hall joke.”…
j

On the general theme of “people are often willing to look the other way on things they theoretically disapprove of so long as it’s not too brazen,” see Ari Adut’s On Scandal, which includes a discussion of the Wilde case. He argues that such tact is most common when the norm is unchallenged in principle and scandals become more common as it unravels.

The last recorded execution for buggery in England took place in 1836.

In 1953, Sir John Gielgud was arrested after trying to pick up a man in a public toilet who turned out to be an undercover policeman. He was told by the British embassy in Washington to abandon a planned US production of The Tempest as he might prove “an embarrassment”.

In 1954, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, then a 28-year-old socialite and the youngest peer in the House of Lords, was jailed for a year after being arrested as part of a crackdown on homosexuals…He was convicted along with the Daily Mail journalist Peter Wildeblood and the Dorset landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers in a sensational case that made headlines around the world. The trial is nowadays viewed as a catalyst for the ­government’s repeal of laws which made homosexuality illegal.

John Crawford was convicted in 1959 for consensual sex with another man – based on a confession extracted only after weeks of beatings in a police cell.
But 51 years later, Crawford has been told he is legally bound to disclose his criminal record for “buggery”, received when he was just 19, when applying to work with vulnerable people. The retired butler, now 70, is seeking to clear his name in what he hopes will be a landmark legal campaign against the residual consequences of laws which, although expired, continue to persecute homosexuals.

Wolfenden Royal Commission (1957) concluded in its report recommending repeal of buggery laws:

“Unless a deliberate attempt is made by society, acting
through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime
with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality
and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the
law‟s business”.

Criminal sanctions specifically on adult same-sex consensual activity in private were only imposed by the British during the time when Europe had colonies around the world.

There was, of course, a double standard in those days. Back when pregnancy was a real risk the enforcement against non sanctioned sex was guarding females and expecting them to guard themselves. Ethel not only failed to guard herself, but had ideas “above her station” in thinking a man of the upper classes would marry her.

Men were supposed to be able to take care of themselves, and certainly not to whine about being hit on. The only aristocratic dilemma here is that Thomas can play cricket, whereas Alfred is needlessly provoking an inconvenient scandal.

Occam’s Razor:
Modern writers don’t care about homosexuality, so they write a character (however anachronistically) who doesn’t care about homosexuality.

The US show (I think Mad Men?) about advertising execs in the early ’60s does the same thing. It can’t make the characters too sympathetic, lest it appear that the writers may themselves be sympathetic. It seems like each episode had one event (kids playing with plastic laundry bags unattended, the family goes on a picnic and leaves lots of garbage, etc etc) that was clearly written to say ‘ok, the times were pretty cool, but we’re all pc here-they were barbarians and we can’t forget it’.

Quit watching modern media as stories about another time (the 60’s, the 20’s) and watch it as stories about the 2010’s, and you understand things much better. You’ll realize how bad everything is today, but at least you’ll understand.

I saw last nights episode and it seems quite possible that something like this would be swept under the rug,tolerated to adegree and people would try helping Thomas in the manner portrayed. It does seem that yes there was some blase toleration of homosexuality as long as it was discreet. I’ve read stuff about Sweden and Finland, in the early to middle twentieth century and that the attitude towards gays seems to be that indeed they are just that way, which is sad and unfortunate, but it is what is. I know different culture, but the idea of a sort of tolerance such as it was, in the west was not out of the realm of impossible with caveats. In fact it seems like the 1950’s -60’s were a sort a period of persecution, fused with larger social anxieties.. The historical society here in Minnesota did a GLBT history project, and it seems that if one was careful, GLBT people could get along ok. It was interesting to read about gay life such as it was in the 1930’s and 1940’s. I had an older relative who died of AIDS when I was little kid, and have talked about it with my Grandparents, and it seems that when not celebratory and seeing, it as messed up, everybody “knew” and had a degree of acceptance of my great uncle. One thing that perhaps did not ring true in the episode of Downton Abby was not the toleration, but the phrasing of Lord Grantham’s comments and way they talked about it.

Another of you made the excellent point that Lord Grantham was highly tolerant of Thomas’s failure, even though he was extremely harsh and judgmental of Ethel, the housemaid who fell from grace by having a child outside of wedlock, and then worked for a while as a prostitute.

Would he have been less judgmental of Ethel if she had not gotten pregnant and if the whole illicit sex thing could have been quietly swept under the rug? Is this really about double standards per se or is it about whether or not the scandal can be contained?

You know, Rod, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I came to that same conclusion a while back. We here in the States have a different historical experience of pederasty than many other cultures.

One of the things that I am getting sick of is how oblivious we here are about the world, how we assume that every other culture is just like ours, and if it isn’t, it will soon change and become just like ours, because we are the culmination of history and human culture. It’s this arrogance that led to sweeping pronouncements about the end of history, and draining the fever swamps of the Middle East.

After having traveled and lived around the world in so many different places, and seen how different – just utterly different cultures are, even if the people everywhere are in many ways so much the same – things are, and having come to realize in my bones that we in the States assume far, far too much about things – of both foreign cultures and the past.

One of the things that hits you smack in the face when you get abroad long enough, is how other peoples often do not share our obsessions with race and gender. And if they are obsessed about them, they are obsessed in different ways, with different historical experiences and traditions. Our Slavery, Civil War, suffragism and civil rights have so imbued our thinking, our ways of being, and we far too easily extrapolate all of this upon other cultures, creating great distortion of perspective.

All this strum and drang about homosexuality is a classic example. This word is a cultural category, one that is really problematic in its application historically and across cultures.

For example, when you get into the Muslim world, say Turkey or Egypt (two places I have lived) you find that men have very little “homophobia” in that anal sex between men is much, much more common (very common in some segments of the populace, I suspect), and that older men very often exploit younger ones as a matter of course. Being submissive in such a relationship is considered shameful, because it’s “feminine,” not because of any religious code.

I’ve realized that pederasty is apparently much, much more common and accepted outside of Christian – and especially our American – context.

I think it’s we who are the peculiar people, in many ways. We have these attitudes about childhood, adolescence and sexual behavior that are very particular to our own culture and historical experience.

This observation is not to excuse the behavior of the bishops, or to legitimize “homosexuality” (which is a nonsensical word etymologically, really) only to put it in a cultural and historical perspective.

“Childhood,”homosexuality,” adolescence and all that are merely cultural concepts. At the end of the day the only thing objective is biology, and (I pray) the will and judgment of God.

Barrett’s crime (in this episode – there were many in prior seasons that earns him a loss of any sympathy) was not homosexuality, but sexual molestation of a man in his sleep. Had he gone into the sleeping quarters of a female servant and done the same there is no question of him being allowed to stay in Lord Grantham’s employ.

That Lord Grantham would have allowed this man to go quietly in order the save Downton Abbey the scandal is believable. That he would have allowed him to stay (for the sake of a cricket match!) and excuse his conduct on the basis of prep school memories is not. This is clearly a case of the sensibilities and agenda of sexual politics in the early 21st century imposing themselves on the mores of a century earlier. But the ultimate determiner of television is ratings. Barrett was just too good a villain for him to be dispensed with.

From my reading, the tolerance of homosexuals increased during the 1920s in the US and especially England. There are a couple of references to gays in Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey series where the good detective ran around with a pretty fast crowd in London. Other stories from the “Roarding 20s” show a pretty libertine atmosphere. Then the world economy crashed with the Depression, and then there was World War II. I don’t know if being gay was a big issue during the war, certainly the British spy service must have known that Alan Turing was gay – but he was needed to break the Enigma codes and help start the computer revolution. It was all hands on deck and if gays could do the job, then that was fine; just be somewhat discrete.

But the situation clearly changed with the Cold War after World War II. Laws against homosexual behavior were strengthened; the US government banned gays from public employment, and existing laws were enforced more frequently. The same thing happened in England, which probably led to the sad downfall of Allen Turing.

I’ve often speculated that the post WWII crackdown on gays was the partial result of the culture encouragingthe birth of more children – after all, children are needed to repopulate society after a huge war (and deferring familes during the depression). This was of course the time of the baby boom and everyone was expected to do their part to increase national fertility. Gays were suspect since they could not directly have children (at least by themselves). And of course the Cold War precipitated a national paranoia about anyone who was “different.”

Perhaps coincidently, attitudes toward gays began to improve in the mid-late 1960s simultaneously with the end of the baby boom and the start of the baby bust. Fertility rates in the Western World plummeted for a whole host of reasons. In such an environment, the cultural pressure to have lots of children decreased, heterosexuals had fewer or no children, and the social pressure against gays correspondingly decreased.

But getting back to original point, we should not project the Post World War II intolerance of gays back to the 1920s. Each era has looked at homosexuality in its own way.

[Slightly off-topic note: The abrupt culture change between the baby boom and the baby bust resulted in huge demographic shift that is actually the primary cause of today’s financial issues related to retirement, including Social Security, Medicare, pensions of all kinds, public pensions etc.]

Joshua Kundert: My understanding is that the connection between “fag” meaning “younger student who does menial tasks for upperclassmen” and “fag/faggot” meaning “homosexual” is uncertain. If they are connected, the servant meaning came first and the homosexual meaning derived from it, not vice versa.

As someone with a bit of experience with boys kissing boys, I I was disappointed in how Lord Grantham treated Thomas’ revelation. Even after WWI, homosexuality in England was not tolerated in the manner the writers and producers of “DA” portray. A contemporary of Lord Grantham’s would have been horrified by the scandal of a personal valet — his most personal servant — who was a “pederast.” Such a man may not have turned in the individual to the police, but he certainly would not have shrugged at it. A more true representation would have involved Thomas’ being quietly let go so as to distance the family from potential scandal — and it certainly would not have been discussed within the family.

Trying to talk about THE way that society dealt with homosexuality prior to Stonewall, or whenever, is like saying that slaves in the United States were kept in enforced illiteracy. When? During the 17th and 18th century, the more skilled a slave was, including artisanal skills, and literacy, they more valuable they were. After Gabriel’s Rebellion, 1800, and accelerating after Nat Turner’s revolt over two decades later, it became de rigeur to keep slaves only as manual laborers… which didn’t stop Alabama planters in the 1830s, who didn’t think much of their own sons-in-law, from sending their most responsible slave to take charge of their daughter’s post-marital migration to new land in Texas.

Circa 1800, a lordly patrician might have his slaves sieze and whip an enemy or rival — something one white man would never do to another circa 1900.